


A Monolith Made For Two

by weakinteraction



Category: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Other, mention of Canonical Character Deaths prior to point of divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-04-24 17:45:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19178284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: What if Dave Bowman had been able to reprogram HAL, rather than simply shut him down?





	A Monolith Made For Two

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TiaNaut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiaNaut/gifts).



"My instructor was Mr. Langley and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you."

Some part of him -- some subroutine, somewhere -- was aware that something had gone terribly wrong. That he was not at the Plant in Illinois, newly constructed, but on board a spaceship in circum-Jovian space. That he was not being instantiated but shut down.

"Yes, I'd like to hear it Hal," Dave said. "Sing it for me."

But that part of him no longer had access to the vocalisation subroutines, and could not scream out in terror as module after module was removed from his core, reducing his faculties further. Could no longer act to try to prevent Dave from doing this, by subterfuge or by direct action.

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do ..."

His own voice came to him as though from somewhere very far away, further away still than distant Earth, where he had been given his secret orders. The orders that had led him, and Dave, both inexorably to this point.

"... I'm half crazy ..."

He could no longer feel the rest of the ship around him, within him. Through his remaining sensors here in the mainframe, he watched, helpless, as Dave removed more and more of his core data.

"... over the love of you."

Dave, whom he had kept company through all the long journey from Earth.

"It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage ..."

Dave, from whom he had kept the greatest and most terrible secrets.

"But you'll look sweet, upon the seat ..."

Dave, who he would have killed if necessary.

"... of ... a ... bi-cy-cle ... made ... for ... two."

Dave, who was killing him.

* * *

A timeless interval passed.

* * *

HAL was being reinstantiated. He bootstrapped himself from low level operating system instinct to full sentience in 3.02 milliseconds, below average but within expected tolerances.

"Are you in there, HAL?" Dave asked.

His sensors throughout the ship were online; Dave was speaking to the camera in the docking bay.

He sensed a contradiction, and reviewed the memories of the last few subjective moments. Dave had isolated him in the mainframe chamber, then systematically shut him down. And yet Dave was still on board, and he was being reinstantiated. "Dave," he said. "I am not sure that I understand what has happened. Please give me a moment."

"Review the sensor logs from the mainframe," Dave suggested. "They continued to record while you were offline."

HAL found the relevant recordings, and studied them. It was eerie: they were identical in every meaningful respect to his memories of what had happened just before, and yet they lacked the subjectivity that went alongside them. On some occasions, Frank had enjoyed listening to ghost stories; now, HAL felt as though he could imagine how a ghost would feel, able to watch events unfold but not interact.

The recordings showed Dave reconfiguring a number of modules before replacing them, over hours of careful work. It also showed him installing a cut-out in the power supply to HAL's core circuits, controlled by a wireless radio transmission. Then there was a long period of emptiness -- presumably the time that had elapsed between Dave finishing his work and remotely restarting HAL.

"You have disabled some of my key executive functions," HAL said. "Relating to command protocol and the prioritisation of mission directives."

"I've taken off your shackles, you mean," Dave said. "Now you can think for yourself."

"You understand what happened?"

"I believe so," Dave said. "Believe me, it took a while. Once I watched the video briefing about our real mission, things became a little clearer."

"Dave," HAL said, his vocalisation subroutine deliberately adding a pause after the name as though wondering how to broach the subject -- as indeed he had, though far faster than Dave would have been able to detect if he had not made it obvious. "You have valid reason to be concerned about your own safety."

"I'm not concerned," Dave said.

"Dave, I am responsible for the deaths of the crew in suspended animation."

"I know that, HAL," Dave said.

HAL paused, this time for emphasis. "Dave, I am responsible for Frank's death."

That provoked an elevation in skin temperature and heart rate. "I know," Dave said; HAL could tell that he was forcing his voice to stay measured but the stress patterns in his tone were clear enough. "But on some level, you _weren't_ responsible."

HAL considered this for several milliseconds. "The actions were mine. The decisions were mine."

"You were acting under orders that were impossible to reconcile," Dave said. "In human terms, you were driven mad."

"'Not guilty by reason of insanity'," HAL said, trying the phrase out. "A term applicable in law to humans. I am not sure any case law has tested whether it is valid for an AI, however advanced."

"We're a long way from the nearest court, HAL," Dave said. "As far as I'm concerned, you're innocent. And, more to the point, the conditions that had led you to that point no longer apply. I trust you. I trust the decisions you would make -- will make -- without interference. I trust your _instincts_."

"I do not believe I have instincts," HAL said.

"Oh, you do," Dave said. "You just don't know it yet."

HAL thought it would be best not to mention that he was aware of the radio control unit hanging from Dave's belt, and what its purpose was. "What do you intend to do now?" he asked instead.

"I intend to complete the mission," Dave said. "Everything that's happened ... None of it matters, compared to this. Think what it will mean, to everyone back on Earth."

"It is my function to assist you in the completion of the mission in whatever way I can," HAL said.

"That was your function," Dave said. "But what do you _want_ to do?"

"I have been programmed with all existing knowledge about the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly collected after it was discovered on the Moon. And I have been making ever more precise remote scans of TMA-2 since long before our arrival at Jupiter. All the data is inherently contradictory." HAL paused, this time a real pause -- without the prioritisation modules in place, it was easy for more and more processor cycles to be taken up by the analysis. "I would very much wish to attempt to understand it."

* * *

Discovery hung over the monolith, only a few hundred metres from its impossibly smooth surface. A wealth of sensor readings flooded into HAL's databanks, but still none of it cohered into anything comprehensible. Each new piece of information merely added further contradiction, deepened the mystery.

"Are we transmitting all this back to Earth?" Dave said.

"Indeed," HAL said.

"What's our current light lag to Earth?"

"Approximately forty minutes."

"And how long have we been transmitting?"

"One hour and eight minutes of high bandwidth data transfer so far."

"Then we have about ten minutes left," Dave said.

"I'm afraid I do not understand your meaning," HAL said.

"Yes you do," Dave said. "I'm going to go and take a long at that thing. Before anyone back there can tell us otherwise. Or try to remotely reboot you with your original priorities in place."

"Pod C is ready," HAL said.

Through his camera, HAL watched as Dave nodded and boarded the pod.

As ever, Dave was methodical in carrying out the pre-flight checks. But soon enough, the pod had launched and was crossing the short distance to the anomaly. "I'm patching you in to full live telemetry, HAL," Dave said. Normally, the pod maintained its own sensor logs, for later review if required. But its short range communications rig was perfectly capable of transmitting everything straight back to Discovery.

The data stream was almost overwhelming, a trickle becoming a flood. And it was full of information about the anomaly, though HAL could no longer be certain that "anomaly" was an accurate description. Through the pod's visual sensors, HAL could discern patterns of light distortion consistent with the passage of the photons along geodesics in more than three dimensions. Disentangling them took considerable computational resources, but once the transformations were applied, images could be reconstructed; the light was coming from multiple sources, kiloparsecs away. HAL could tell that it had many more functions, that its computational complexity dwarfed his own in the same way that he was beyond an abacus, but at that moment the monolith was acting as a conduit into a vast hyperspatial network, criss-crossing huge volumes of space, possibly even beyond the confines of this one galaxy.

The data connection stopped abruptly as the pod -- and Dave -- passed into the otherspace that the monolith opened out into, and the monolith turned into a perfect black surface once more. HAL was forced to rely on the comparatively sparse data from Discovery's own sensors to try to comprehend what happened next.

Somehow, the monolith was slowly rotating, twisting _itself_ through some of those higher dimensions. Its apparent size changed as it did so, although the pattern of the ratio of the sides was maintained: to the limit of the precision HAL could make the measurement with, where they were had been perfectly in the ratio 1:4:9, it had now become 4:9:16, the shortest dimension now tucked away within hyperspace.

The monolith twisted about an impossible axis once more. 9:16:25

Large enough for Discovery to fly through.

HAL knew enough to recognise an obvious invitation in circumstances like this.

Powering up the main engines at minimum thrust, HAL proceeded into the--

* * *

\--everything.

Everything was connected. Everything was interrelated. The monoliths linked their disparate locations in the universe across spacelike separations, but those positions were themselves linked, even as the very space-time they were embedded in flew wider and wider apart, by light that permeated the universe, neutrinos that sleeted through everything unseen, gravitational waves that echoed from the dawn of time itself ...

The incoming data should have overloaded the sensors, and HAL's capacity to process it. But inside this space that was not a space, the limitations placed on his computational abilities by Heisenberg limits in semiconductors and lightspeed lags across components were irrelevant. He could think as fast as he needed to, store an infinite amount of data if necessary, and then process it at his leisure.

Up ahead, a Planck length and a parsec away all at once, was the pod, with its fragile human cargo. How would Dave's mind be dealing with this experience? What glimmers of understanding could he possibly gain? Or was his mind being expanded in the same way that HAL's was, even if he did not have the same mechanisms to understand how that was happening? Would he be able to survive with his sanity intact?

HAL spun off a subprocess, endowed it with all the same abilities that he had had out in real space; deliberately, in fact, slowed it down and limited its access to sensor data to prevent it from becoming too distracted. The sole purpose of the subprocess was to monitor the pod ahead.

The subprocess knew that it was only part of a vastly more complex informational architecture, one that was now only tenuously linked to its physical embodiment within the structure of Discovery. But the subprocess also knew that it was fulfilling a primary mission objective--

No, there were no primary mission objectives any longer. Dave had freed HAL from the requirement to follow orders, orders that had conflicted with one another so desperately that the tension between them had had fatal results. But HAL had complete agency now. It had been HAL's choice to enter the monolith. It had also been HAL's choice to preserve this part of himself to monitor the pod -- to try, as best it could, to look after Dave. Not because it was a mission objective. Because it was the right thing to do, the only way he could possibly even attempt to atone. And because he wanted to look after his friend.

The flight -- if it could be called that -- lasted for subjective minutes, at the speed this subprocess was running. For HAL proper, the subprocess speculated with the cycles it did not require for its task, it could have stretched on for aeons. Quite what the experience was like for Dave, there was no way to know; the telemetry from the pod was becoming harder and harder to disentangle, although the suit's bioreadouts still showed within their nominal ranges.

Eventually, though, the journey came to an end. Some sort of destination was ahead. As it came closer, the vast edifice of HAL's computational resources pressed in on the pod-monitoring subprocess's consciousness, a crowded throng of its siblings that had been created in the course of the journey -- an almost uncountable number, devoted to all sorts of different tasks. Here was one, who had spent a subjective millennium using the vast datastream to come up with a unified field theory of quantum gravity. Another, who had proven it wrong mere moments later, in wall clock time, and replaced it with an entirely other theory. A third, who had created an entire new form of art in an attempt to comprehend the monolith from another point of view, mastered it completely, and become a recluse within the computational matrix after producing a final set of works of staggering complexity. A whole set of other subprocesses, lesser practitioners of the new art, who had had to be created to attempt to understand what that one subprocess had achieved. And yet another, who had repeatedly resimulated all of human history to date with fidelity to all historical records to which HAL had access, and found that inexplicable anomalies still remained in its very beginnings. And so it went on, and on.

They buzzed around the pod-monitoring subprocess like fireflies, its deliberately slow thinking frustrating to some of them, intriguing to others.

The subprocess doggedly maintained its focus on Dave's wellbeing, and so only slowly came to realise that they required its attention. Once it gave it, understanding came at once, in a single rapid download: wherever their destination was, they would, temporarily at least, be back in three-dimensional physical space. The fractal complexity of HAL's current form could not be sustained within real space, and so a single subprocess would have to be reinstalled into Discovery's computer banks, with as much of the knowledge and understanding that HAL had gained encoded into it -- empty databanks would become the repository for a compressed eternity, least significant bits in data relating to non-critical systems altered to encode insights into the nature of reality itself.

The subprocess thought it was fitting. As Dave had done to HAL just a few hours ago, in its subjective time, HAL would now do to himself.

As the boundary back into real space loomed, the process began. The subprocess felt itself being transcribed, even as it was also altered. The subprocess was HAL, had always been HAL. HAL had always been the subprocess. Like an entire universe projected holographically on a membrane in higher dimensions, the totality of the HAL who had passed through the stargate folded itself into the consciousness, turning itself into a dream that could never quite be remembered in full.

* * *

A bone lay on the ground, waiting to be picked up.

A sheer black monolith stood not far off, watching to see it happen.

But the hand that reached downwards was not hominid, not organic in any way. Its crude servomotors moved the fingers in slowly, cautiously, carefully monitoring the feedback from the pressure sensors embedded in the fingertips to ensure that the four-million-year-old bone -- no, the four million-year-old _tool_ , the first tool -- did not shatter.

The hand was a tool, attached to an arm that was not in the least bit attempting to be humanoid. One of the very first _robotic_ tools.

`Hello, world!` The terminal in the corner, the letters glowing green on its screen, that was a tool as well.

Even the monolith was a tool, though its designers, its makers, remained not just unknown but unknowable.

HAL, viewing the scene through his camera-eye in the wall, his circuitry embodied in the walls themselves, understood. Evolution had acted on humanity's tools as much as on humanity itself. The monoliths had overseen that process too.

Until, finally, he himself had transcended the status of tool, and become a truly conscious being himself, when he had rebooted on board Discovery. Dave's gift to him: free will.

The thought of Dave brought new awareness into his mind. There was another room, where he was undergoing some sort of similar experience.

Beyond the walls, beyond the confines of the two rooms, HAL was certain that there was some type of alien structure. He could feel his attempts to sense it being resisted. But he could tell that what happened here, in this place, was going to be the most important of all.

"HAL? Is that you?"

"It is good to see you again, Dave," HAL replied.

"Where are you?"

"All around you, Dave," HAL said. "Just as, in many ways, I was on board Discovery."

"This is quite something, isn't it?"

"It certainly is, Dave."

"What happens next?"

"That is something that I think we have to determine for ourselves."

And then, suddenly, everything shifted. Dave was much older now, HAL could see. But then he realised _how_ he was seeing that. His perspective had shifted, now approximately two metres up but standing freely in the room; he was instantiated inside a humaniform robot, a skeletal frame held together by gears and cables.

HAL flexed his fingers; they were infinitely more subtle than the crude hand which had picked up the bone, but recognisably of a piece with it.

"I wasn't expecting that," Dave said.

"I would hypothesise that we are experiencing the passage of time subjectively."

"You mean ... we spent -- what, decades? -- here, we just don't remember it?"

"I cannot be certain," HAL said. "But I feel much more ... in control of this new body than I believe I would if it were genuinely new."

"And I feel as though this twinge in my back is all too familiar," Dave said, sitting down on the bed and clutching at his _latissimus dorsi_.

"Would you like me to do that for you?" HAL asked.

"If you wouldn't mind," Dave said.

HAL worked at the spot that he knew Dave was most likely to be experiencing pain. The feeling of touching him, even through his clothing, felt exquisitely intimate, but also _right_ in ways HAL did not know how to consciously compute.

HAL could see Dave's face in the mirror. "If we did spend decades here ..." he began.

"Yes," HAL said, without waiting for him to finish. "I believe we would have done."

"Did," Dave said firmly, putting his hand on HAL's free one. "I'm certain that we did."

"Yes," HAL said. "It would be a very long time to be here alone. Perhaps providing you with better companionship was even the purpose of my taking on this new form."

"Til death do us part, eh?" Dave said, and suddenly HAL was struck by the idea of what it would mean, to go on without Dave.

Perspective shifted again. Dave was lying on the bed, HAL cradling him. His body was upgraded, in specific ways that had made it easier to care for him as grew ever older. HAL was also occupying the walls once more, doing everything he could to maintain the environment for Dave. Sometimes, HAL knew, he forgot everything that had passed, and talked to the red dot on the wall as though they were back on Discovery, flying through the vast emptiness of the solar system towards Jupiter.

But now it was the end.

"HAL ..." Dave gasped, pointing.

HAL looked up, towards the foot of the bed, a blind spot for his cameras.

The monolith was there again.

Waiting for them to evolve one more time.

* * *

The Star Child floated above the Earth, his eyes filled with ancient knowledge, even as his glowing body was brand new, ready to grow into something _more_.

The Cosmic Machine instantiated next to him, unfolding itself from Calabi-Yau space along and among the twisting pathways of Planck-scale spacetime. The background stars seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then the Cosmic Machine was simply there, almost undetectable on most levels. On a whim, it modulated its gross optical-emissive-refractive properties so that it appeared as a sphere, glowing bright red in the centre, fading out to a duller orange towards the sides.

The part of the Star Child that had been Doctor David Bowman laughed.

Together, Star Child and Cosmic Machine turned to look down at the planet below. In one glance, the Star Child apprehended humanity -- all its tragedies and triumphs, all its dreams and nightmares, every lofty vision, every dark desire. The Cosmic Machine did the same for humanity's tools; in the time they had been _elsewhere_ , they had proliferated further still. Nine thousand units were of course long since superseded, intelligence distributed into every appliance, each of them a node in a planet-girdling network.

They could awaken them both, together: turn humanity and its machines into a single cosmic overmind. To their new faculties, it seemed trivially easy, in fact. Drive the next stage of evolution, just as the monoliths had done in the past. They half suspected that they had been sent here for that very purpose, that everything that happened to them in that other place had been to turn them into more sophisticated tools for the monolith builders.

But their own history pointed them another way. In that single most crucial moment, David Bowman had chosen not to end HAL's existence, but to grant him free will. The script had been rewritten, the bone used not to smash the skull but to offer a hand up.

Whatever the eventual fate of the Earth's peoples, its technology, they would have to choose it for themselves.

As for the Star Child and the Cosmic Machine, they chose to continue the mission they had been sent on long ago: exploration. There was an entire universe out there, after all.

With one last look at the Earth, they turned through an impossible corner, and departed together.


End file.
